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The Cleveland Cavaliers have fired general manager Chris Grant on Thursday afternoon, according to Yahoo! Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski.
The Cleveland Cavaliers have fired general manager Chris Grant, league sources tell Yahoo Sports.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) February 6, 2014
The Cavaliers fell to 16-33 after another embarrassing loss to the Los Angeles Lakers on Wednesday night and I guess owner Dan Gilbert had finally seen enough. It was essentially inevitable that Grant would be fired after the horrible start to the Cavaliers' season, but it comes as a bit of a surprise that he was fired before the end of the year.
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Just a month ago, the Cavaliers traded for Luol Deng from the Chicago Bulls and Chris Grant was presumably involved in that deal. Today, Grant is no longer in charge of the team. There's still a couple of weeks before the trade deadline and I would expect Cleveland to still be quite active with whoever Gilbert puts in charge.
The Cavaliers are currently in their 4th season since LeBron James left and haven't made much progress. They've had a number of high draft picks, including All Star Kyrie Irving, but still aren't winning games. The Andrew Bynum Experiment flamed out, the free agent signings of Jarrett Jack and Earl Clark haven't been very productive, and Grant's drafting has left a lot to be desired. Once Chris Grant fired Byron Scott, it was obvious that Grant would be the next to go. Mike Brown has only coached half a season with these Cavaliers and presumably still has the support of Dan Gilbert. However, it's certainly possible that a new GM will want to hire his own head coach.
It will be interesting to see who takes over for the rest of the year. My best guess is that David Griffin would just step up as the interim GM until they can conduct a full search during the offseason. Despite all of the turmoil in Cleveland, the Cavs GM job figures to still be fairly appealing. They have tons of flexibility and are loaded with draft picks in the near future. This is almost certainly just the first of many changes in the Cavaliers organization.
